Time to Slow

It’s blissfully quiet - no cars rumbling down the road, no planes blasting over head. The only sound is the kitties chewing their breakfast kibble.

It feels like the world needs a rest. I saw pictures of the Venice canals - the water was running clear, and the fish and the swans were returning. When the factories in China shut down, the air cleared for the first time in decades.

There’s something that feels very important about this time - a slowing down, a drastic shift in everyday life, something deeply supportive for us as a people and for the planet.

Why Quitting Is a Great Idea

I am terrible at quitting things. 

Actually, I’m amazing at quitting things. I’m just not great at continuing to quit things. I’ll quit sugar and then decide a week later that a salted chocolate chip cookie is a brilliant idea. (Because it is.) I’ll quit coffee and decide an hour later that the world needs me caffeinated. (Because it does.)

I’ve needed to quit channeling and energy healing for over a year.⠀

I love channeling. But all arrows have been pointing to STOP since last March - but I was in my NO CHANNELING IS MY THING denial phase for all of 2019.⠀

It IS my thing. Channeling will always be my thing. But doing the channeling and energy healing for other people was killing my health and my energy.⠀

So I quit. I quit doing the thing that drains me, the thing that closes off my life, rather than opens it up.⠀

Because I want to feel good. I want to have energy for things like writing books and having friends. I want to do all the things that make me happy, like going to dance class, exploring this beautiful state and world I’m lucky enough to live in, learning new things, smelling the goddamn rosemary.⠀

Quitting the thing you know you need to quit makes space for other things, things that feel better.⠀

Channeling can be just another tool in my arsenal, a bonus for people I work with - like, hey, Joan of Arc is here for you! - rather than the main event. Thank god.

I'm making life simple for awhile. I'm going to do sessions with writers ( because working with witchy authors to help them do the goddamn thing is my jam) and with sensitive humans (because helping people feel better is my joy) - and trust that it’s enough. If you want to schedule a session with me, I'd love to help.⠀

We're allowed to quit. To have a life that feels fun, that feels good, that doesn’t drain the very marrow of our soul - and we get to do that in any way we goddamn please.

Sometimes that means leaving something behind, even something you thought you would do or be or have or love forever.⠀

But it always, always opens the door for something better.

Like clinging to an octopus for no discernible reason.

Soften

My internal message this morning was “soften.”

I am such a tense little pigeon. I clench and tighten and stop breathing without even noticing that I’m cutting off my flow of air. Trust me, when you clench off your flow of air, you’re cutting off all your flow - the flow of love, the flow of money, the flow of inspiration, the flow of healing, the flow of divinity trying to make it into this human body of mine.

In the midst of living my life, I’m doing my best to catch myself when I tense and tighten up. Soften into this life. Feel safe in this body, in this place. Feel safe in all the circumstances and events and thoughts and feelings of my Amber existence.

Softening actually makes for a pretty good day. When I soften, I become more aware of the air around me - the bright sky above, the trees flashing past the window of my car, how lucky I am to have money for a sandwich I can eat in the sun and a coffee I can drink in my favorite writing spot.

Softening allows gratitude to show up easily - something that I tend to struggle with. Softening allows my thoughts to quiet. Softening allows my lungs to take in more than ten percent of their capacity. Softening helps me feel like every step I take is worth something, rather than spinning my wheels fruitlessly.

The first part of this year has really been about devoting myself to the small daily habits that support my health, evolution, and work. Alternating walking and yoga-ing so my body doesn’t petrify on the couch. Turning on the writing faucet every day so that if anything wants to come through me, it has a chance. Channeling for myself every morning, because I’m great at channeling for everyone else and not so good at channeling for myself. But spending five minutes each morning receiving messages for myself has skipped that evolution forward massively.

I’m rebuilding my foundations, after a year of shifting and redrawing boundaries and wondering what on god’s green earth I was doing with my life. I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, to be clear. But I do know that I can get up every morning and take a walk and write some words and check in with my guides and share what I’m led to share and heal for anyone who wants it - and maybe that’s all I need to know about my life right now.

On Being Happy In a Human Body

Inhabiting my body and my life and my relationships is one of the hardest things for me. It doesn’t feel safe. Though of course, being fully in the body is the safest place for us. But try telling that to my gun-shy soul.

I joke that I was lured back down into the world and a human body with the promise of sex and donuts.

Now that I’m here and know that sugar makes me crazy (meaning donuts = bad idea) (let’s not even get into the marathon of terrible that sex was through most of my twenties) , I realize that I should’ve read the fine print.

Last night I was at an acupuncture appointment with one of my favorite healers. She was asking me about my relationship - and she completely lost my pulse as I answered. It was like I just dropped straight out of my body. Like the rug was pulled out from under me - which is how I feel in most of my relationships, romantic or not.

Being fully in my relationship is - apparently - a really rich place of exploration for me. It also feels like boarding a ship to sail for the horizon when everyone still believed the world was flat.

In a miracle of eastern medicine, she stuck needles into me in the places that would help my body feel like a safe place for my soul to land. Which is quite a good trick, considering that my soul was not even a little bit interested in another human life and life’s few redeeming aspects have proved problematic.

Even though I don’t want to be here most of the time, I love this world and I love the people in it. And when I can rise enough out of my own nonsense, I love my own life. My life has sunshine and beaches and cats and coffee and writing words and a boyfriend who’s an excellent cook.

So my other place of exploration/trying-not-to-fall-off-the-edge is being so at home in myself and my body and my energy that I can embody that love rather than all the fear. (So much fear, my god.)

It becomes a daily practice of doing everything I know to do to stay in my own center rather than being buffeted around by the world and the people and all the feelings. This is why I harp on about light all the time. Using my imagination to sling light through my life is one of the best ways to help myself feel better.

Honestly, I don’t really know what it looks like to fully inhabit my body and relationships and life. I just have to trust myself and my guidance and keep moving in the direction that feels good. That’s all we can ever do.

On Being a Gentle Observer (Instead of a Brutal Dictator)

Gray days are my favorite. I always feel less guilty for staying inside all day if rain is imminent, and any situation in which I feel less guilty instead of more guilty is a situation I enjoy.

I have an awful lot of guilt, especially for someone who wasn’t raised Catholic.

Sometimes I attribute this to my empathic nature - I’m sponging up everybody else’s guilt! - and while this may be part of it, mostly I just need to be firmer with myself.

Be the gentle observer of my thoughts, rather than the stern and temperamental disciplinarian. Watch instead of flagellate.

It sounds obvious, right? WHEN IN FACT IT IS VERY DIFFICULT. I could indulge in my usual rant on how we’ve been trained by society to be brutally tough on ourselves or I could just talk about how I’m doing my utmost to send my brain in the direction I want to go, rather than following its programmed whims to their unsatisfactory conclusion.

Therefore!

Here’s how I’m learning to be a gentle observer (as opposed to the brutal dictator):

• Notice what’s going on internally without judging my thoughts, my feelings, myself, or anyone else’s self.

• Remind myself twenty-seven times a day that I haven’t done anything wrong, that I’m doing enough, that I am enough, that everything is okay, that everything is - in fact - working out for my good.

• Breathe through anything that gets triggered or kicked up internally.

• If breathing doesn’t work and I find myself in a serious spin, do something to come back to neutral - like go for a walk or read a favorite book or watch something nourishing on Netflix.

• Once I’ve returned to neutral, do my best to identify the truth underneath the brain chatter.

What our brains spit out at us isn’t usually true, and it takes some investigative digging to move below the programmed responses and into the wiser self / still small voice / intuitive understanding / real-ass truth.

As an example, here is a thought I think almost daily: “I should have done more.”

On the surface it sounds very true, but that’s mostly because the world enjoys shouting about productivity and I eagerly sucked up all that shouting along with a number of How To Be Better Than You Are articles. (Sigh.)

Rule #1: Whenever a thought doesn’t feel good, that thought probably isn’t true. (Your soul is using your emotional GPS to steer you away from said untrue thought, because your soul is good at this stuff.)

So I dig a little deeper, because that “You didn’t do enough today!” thought doesn’t feel good and so, as per Rule #1, I do my best to question it before going too far down the Not Enough rabbit hole. “Is it really true that I should have gotten more done today?”

Rule #2: Anything your brain says you “should” do needs to be investigated further. Should is a bullshit word that should be eliminated from the English language. (Heh.)

When I go deeper than my brain’s basic trigger responses, I start to tap into my smarter self, who says something like, “That arbitrary number you’ve determined will make you worthy is not the thing that makes you worthy. You are enough when you believe you’re enough. You’ve done enough when you believe you’ve done enough.”

Uh, okay. Great. So how do I do that?

“Celebrate what you have done.”

Sounds great.

Hereby celebrating what I have done (please feel free to join me):

Got up this morning and put on socks. Cue Kool and the Gang singing Celebration!

Wrangled a gnarly-feeling financial issue. Good job, Amber!

Ate delicious roast beef sandwich while my boyfriend ate hot pastrami at a deli with peeling green paint and ridged tin siding that’s been open since 1947, facts that don’t matter but that I enjoyed. Well done, us!

Bought thank-you cards, an errand I have been unsuccessfully attempting for over a week now. Check!

Cat curled up next to me for a whole three minutes. Glory be!

Wrote this blog post to help myself remember all the things I already know (a more challenging task than it might sound) and also because I have a Write Every Day Because You Are A Goddamn Writer plan. Woohoo!

Made healthy lentil soup for dinner. It might even taste good!

I might do some yoga after this, which my body would really appreciate. Smug city!

To sum up, catch the mean thoughts, the thoughts that don’t feel good, the thoughts that are perpetuating cycles that we are all so goddamn over, and question their veracity. When they have been identified as Wholly Untrue, check into what is true. With a side order of celebrating what we did do. Because celebrating oneself is a darn good idea, whether the sun is shining or not.